I love coming back from a few days off and finding new books on my chair. We received copies of four of the latest books covering SharePoint, Groove and Expression Design.

Congratulations to Errin O'Connor and the team here on the publication of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out!

Congratulations to Penelope Coventry and the team here on the publication of SharePoint Designer Step by Step!

Congratulations to John Pierce, Rick Jewell, Barry Preppernau and the team here on the publication of Microsoft Office Groove 2007 Step by Step!

Congratulations to Sara Froehlich, Marc Campbell and the team here on the publication of Microsoft Expression Design Step by Step.

Would someone please turn the clock back the late eighties when the buzzword was "customer service." Remember the good old days when it seemed like every business story started off with an anecdote about Nordstrum? Please Tom Peters, start preaching on customer service again.

Thursday night I came home all set to work on leveling my World of Warcraft warrior. I needed to relax and looked forward to killing a few monsters and selling a few things on the game auction. Much to my horror, my internet access was down. Oh no!!! I tried restarting the modems and routers, but no luck. I tried to call my husband on his cell phone through our land line. I got a message telling me to "not dial a 1". Huh? I always dial a 1. So I try it without the "1." And then it tells me to deposit coins. What the? Well, apparently because my wireless was registering in my house with a strong signal, but no internet, somehow the phone line was bad.

So I called Verizon help. They were nice enough and set an appointment between 8 and 6:30 the next day. Yes, that's right all day. So I sat. In my house. With no connection to the outside all day. You know how hard it is to work without an internet connection? Very hard now. I managed to answer my offline email. Then I decided to complete my home office.

I bought a new desk from IKEA a few months back. I wanted a desk with a pull down door so I could close it when not in use. Because the desk involved 40 something steps (I'm not kidding) I had put it off. I dedicated about three hours to it over the holidays, but I still had at least 10 steps left to go. By the way, I am very proud that I can read directions and put these things together myself, on the other hand, why am I my own labor? And who is going to pay for the manicure to take care of my roughened hands? I finished the desk. I put my computer in it. But without internet access I still really couldn't do anything.

So the repairman never arrived. I called several times and someone finally showed up on Saturday. He was very nice and it turns out my line had been messed up, so he had to do a quick fix back at their office to get it back online. And they did give me a credit for waiting. But really! I was without phone or internet for over 36 hours!!!

So on Saturday I was able to play a little WOW and get on the internet. But then, another problem arose. My daughter wanted to sit on my lap to play on starfall.com. Fine. Until she started shifting around on my lap and putting her weight down on the pulldown portion of the desk. It was then that I realized the fatal design flaw in my desk. It is tippy. Now, it did come with some bolts to screw it into the wall, but my home office has a "lip" around floor meaning you can't put the desk right up against the wall. Argh. So now I have to watch her until I can figure out a way to bolt the desk down.

I've been thinking a lot about simplicity lately. I worked a bit over the holidays and it looks like most folks didn't so it was so refreshing to open up my in-box and see very little there.

Also a funny thing happened to my Outlook a few weeks ago. I had several RSS feeds set up through my Outlook box and for some reason most of them stopped updating. And you know what? I really didn't miss them. Maybe a couple and those I just went directly to the websites. Between email, RSS feeds and my Facebook account demanding attention I've been suffering from ADD.

So I'm going to try and simplify this year.

As part of that, I thought briefly about taking down this blog. I've been doing it now since December 2004 which is a long time and my posts have become less frequent. But then I thought, "Nyah." I have to have SOME sort of outlet for my thoughts and interests. And who is going to ever pay me for those thoughts? Right?

So you get to put up with my blog for at least another few months. Because there is one topic I've been dying to write about...

Congratulations to Joan Preppernau, Joyce Cox, and the team here on the publication of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 Step by Step. This book is a scaled down version of Microsoft Office 2007 System Step by Step--covering Word, Excel, PowerPoint and with added coverage of OneNote. All for a low $24.99.